Abstract
Mapping one’s location in the world is a navigational pursuit inherent to the human condition. Spatiality studies and literary geocriticism provide the framework of topophrenia, or the enduring “placemindedness” of the everyday body, which influences thought and behavior. Through literary analysis, this thesis considers the intimate relationship of space, place, and mapping with humanity as it grapples with orientation in individually and socially meaningful places. Such spatial consciousness unearths a persistent navigational tendency and its implications for establishing spatially informed understanding.
This thesis investigates the topophrenic condition of three authors and their works not always discussed for their significantly cartographic and geographically imaginative aspects. Hypocritical tourism of the georgic farmer in Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker reveals the function of the geographical imagination in charting one’s situatedness through place-based experience. The mundanity of the everyday wanderer in the “Wandering Rocks” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses locates how navigation both guides the commonplace occupants of the city and illuminates the citizens as the animators of meanings found in specific places. Elizabeth Bowen’s novels and essays capture the inextricable influence of topophrenia on one’s geographical, relational, and personal identification. A geocritical reading of these texts facilitates an enriched understanding of the ways in which space and place condition experiences within, thoughts about, and understandings of this multidimensional world.
KEY WORDS: Spatiality, Literary geocriticism, Topophrenia, Geographical imagination, Spatial consciousness, Joyce, Smollett, Bowen, space, place.